I fall in love too easily

This sentiment came to mind as I was obsessing about a pair of boots I don’t need.  I said it aloud, after I had finished laughing at myself and how the boots were going to fix my entire winter wardrobe (all half dozen pieces of it) and accentuate my mature glamour (ha). 

I looked up the line and discovered it was a song by the great Chet Baker

– I can’t tell you a note of the music – but I knew the line wasn’t mine.  So I borrowed it.

The mind is a wonderful thing.   It’s worth saying that very loudly as the one sided debate (one sided because we are hooked on progress as a positive) about Artificial Intelligence grows ever louder and  AI looks ever more  like mass identity theft. 

Yes, there will be positive applications though even the people who pioneered it want laws and containment. That old adage about stable doors and bolting horses comes to mind.   Saddest words in the English language are “too late.”

The idea of mind can’t be measured or defined or if so, in several parallel ways – remember, parallel means running alongside, never meeting.  You can have a political mind alongside an artistic mind ( see the obituary of Milos Kundera), a broken mind (good luck Huw Edwards and his straight backed and face it wife) alongside a mind that was “always good at the job.”.  You can have a mind for mischief (don’t confuse that with benignancy) like Elon Musk or a mind for business like Jeff Bezos.  You can have a visionary mind like Michael Bukht who started me in radio or a mind for manipulation (too long a list). 

Or you can just be soppy like me and decide that this, that or the other thing would make all the difference.

I do not fall in love too easily with people.  Not for me the glance across the crowded room – probably hampered by short sight.   I do not look to be transfigured by somebody else.  The door to me is open but that doesn’t mean I may not close it.  I thought about that the other day when I saw a woman I have avoided since her last full frontal hectoring at me made me roar and break out in hives.  I thought when I saw her recently that I was ready to say just that politely if she asked – don’t like being spoken to as if I were a difficult child, I am 79, I can chose and I chose not.  Too old and too ugly, smile and walk away. 

I could hear my mother cheering from the back rows of angels fifth class.

I fall in love with colour.  Several times in my life I have bought entirely the wrong thing because it was the right colour.  Now I walk away muttering “Leave it alone, it’s just that colour …”    

I am in love with books – a book drunk – but if you have ever read annalog, you’ll know that.   But I am not in love with all books by any means.  I have a friend who reads by just letting the words move in front of her eyes.  Not me.  My school taught reading with understanding.  Twice in the recent past I bought stuff which was too intellectually remote – one a book on Ukraine which I really wanted to read. But the pages passed before my eyes, nothing engaged me, I couldn’t get in. 

So I gave up.  

Falling in love suggest the cloak of permanence over the reality of change.   Like being crazy about a certain kind of food – and then deciding one day you have had enough of it.   Or a habit wears itself out or you decide that you will change it and – you know what? – the sky does not fall on your head.  The perfume you always swore by is suddenly old and declasse.

Falling in love as per the title for me is always about something I can buy to make myself more  whatever it is I think I am not,  ie antique earrings, boots – it was the colour (ash khaki) – a miracle cream … but I have learned that if I do not succumb, somebody else will, I will be rescued from my fixation and  life goes on.